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Arab Revolts Force Diplomats to Remake Lives and Careers

WASHINGTON — The maids who once swept the white marble floors at the Libyan ambassador’s residence here have gone home to the Philippines, their visas expired now that their boss, Ali Suleiman Aujali, has quit his job. The driver is gone, too. Pretty soon, Mr. Aujali figures, the State Department will repossess the official license plates on the shiny black Mercedes and Audi parked in his garage.

But Mr. Aujali is hanging on, trapped in a diplomatic no man’s land.

The embassy he ran for more than two years — a seventh-floor suite in the Watergate, overlooking the Potomac — was shut down by the State Department last week.

So Mr. Aujali, who resigned as Libya’s ambassador in Washington when he broke with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in late February, has set up shop at home. From a bank of computers in his basement dining room, he is trying to reinvent himself as Washington’s official representative of a new Libyan government — one that does not yet exist.

“I’m not representing the regime anymore — I’m representing the people,” Mr. Aujali declared, dandling his 15-month-old grandson on his knee. Or, as Aly R. Abuzaakoouk, a Libyan human rights advocate and a friend of Mr. Aujali, put it, “Now, he’s an ambassador of an uprising.”

Mr. Aujali, who has served Libya for 40 years, is part of an extraordinary wave of sudden ex-diplomats who, depending on one’s point of view, are exhibiting uncommon courage or a savvy instinct for self-preservation. Libya’s ambassador to the United Nations and other officials there have also thrown their lot in with revolutionaries, as have senior Libyan diplomats in France, India and China. Three Yemeni ambassadors — to the United Nations, Syria and Lebanon — resigned to protest a government crackdown on protesters there.

Such breaks are not new. During the Reagan administration, Panama’s ambassador in Washington declared his independence from Gen. Manuel Noriega, who had just staged a coup. In July 2001, two Iraqi diplomats defected and sought asylum in New York. (Mr. Aujali said he was not seeking asylum.) What makes the current crop unusual, said David Mack, a retired American ambassador who has served in Libya, is the sheer size of it.

“There have been celebrated cases,” Mr. Mack said. “But I don’t recall so many at once breaking with a regime.”

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Ali Suleiman Aujali is trapped in a diplomatic no man's land.Credit
Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times

In Washington, where diplomats are often faceless, the democratic fervor sweeping the Arab world has forced many to adjust. Ambassadors from Tunisia and Egypt, where revolutions were largely peaceful, have remained in their posts. But for those from countries where protests have turned bloody, like Bahrain, Yemen and especially Libya, the choices seem more complex.

The Bahraini ambassador, Houda Ezra Nonoo, is keeping a low profile. So is the Yemeni ambassador, Abdulwahab Abdulla al-Hajjri, dubbed “D.C.’s Dean of Diplomacy” by Time magazine, in part for his nightly dinners and parties, “some of which,” Time reported, “end with dancing in the wee hours of the morning.”

Mr. Hajjri, a brother-in-law of the Yemeni president, seems to be staying put. But Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdullah Alsaidi, quit Friday.

“To have sharpshooters in balconies in houses shooting people in the head and neck — for me, I can no longer in good conscience articulate the position of the government to the U.N. authorities,” Mr. Alsaidi said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Now, he is looking for a place to live. The Yemeni government has appointed his replacement and he must give up his government-owned apartment at Park Avenue and 71st Street in Manhattan. His three children were educated in the United States, and he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University. But now, stripped of his diplomatic credentials, he is not certain he can stay. He has saved some money, and intends to take some time “to read and reflect.”

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Mr. Aujali, the former Libyan ambassador, is taking a more aggressive tack.

At 66, the son of a farmer and a housewife from an oasis near the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, Mr. Aujali served in Malaysia, Argentina, Brazil and Canada before arriving in Washington in 2004 to open the “interest section” here. Colonel Qaddafi had just renounced nuclear weapons, prompting President George W. Bush to re-establish ties.

In 2009, Mr. Aujali — who says he does not know Colonel Qaddafi well — became Libya’s first ambassador to the United States in 35 years. He set about renovating the ambassador’s mansion near Embassy Row, which reeked of mildew after having been closed for decades.

“I came,” he said, “with the great hope that we will be able to establish better relations.”

His relationship with Colonel Qaddafi seems to have involved the kind of complicated compromises ambitious people in public life sometimes make. He helped arrange for Libya to make reparations for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, yet took the Qaddafi line in defending the transfer of the bomber back to Libya in 2009.

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Ali Suleiman Aujali quit as Libya's ambassador in Washington when he broke with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi last month.Credit
Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times

Still, he drew plaudits for meeting with Qaddafi critics and working to open the United States to Libyan students, entrepreneurs and tourists. “He was a pro, and a reasonable man,” said Elliot Abrams, who advised Mr. Bush on democracy and human rights. “I was not shocked to hear when the wave of defections began that he was in it.”

Since he announced that he was quitting the Qaddafi government, Mr. Aujali has been making the case to anyone who will listen — reporters, senators and even Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — that the White House should recognize the rebels’ shadow government council. He insists that Colonel Qaddafi must be ousted. “With Qaddafi, you never trust him,” he said.

But what he wants immediately is for the Treasury Department to free up the $30 billion it has frozen in Libyan assets. “Then we can run our office, then we can rent a place, then we can buy humanitarian aid for our people.”

Not so fast, said an administration official, who spoke anonymously to discuss Mr. Aujali’s situation. The State Department accepts Mr. Aujali as a representative of the council, the official said, but “we consider him a private citizen now” and he must “adjust his visa accordingly.” The meeting with Mrs. Clinton, he said, was part of an effort to “get a sense of who these people are and where they’re coming from.”

While friends of Mr. Aujali’s view his break as an act of courage, some Libya experts see political expediency. After all, if the rebels prevail, he could get his job back — maids, driver and all.

“I think all of these resignations came at a particular time when it looked like the opposition may have had a very good chance,” said Diederick J. Vandewalle, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who has traveled extensively in Libya. “I think they were just trying to hedge their bets.”

Mr. Aujali insists that he is just trying to do what is best for the Libyan people. At home on a recent day, his extended family — including a son who attends George Mason University, two grandchildren, a daughter and son-in-law who resigned from Libya’s mission at the United Nations in New York — puttered in the kitchen. He waved off questions about how long they can remain, saying his own situation is the least of his concerns.

“I’m busy, very very busy,” the former ambassador said. “There are a lot of things we have to do.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Arab Revolts Force Diplomats To Remake Lives and Careers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe